> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.

How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?

So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.

I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.

I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.

While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.

Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.

The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.

Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.

I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.

Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.

I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)

I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.

For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.

Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.

It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.

I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.

I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.

one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms

It really is hard to overstate just how much progress there's been in the past few years. I first started using Linux in late 2012 (with Ubuntu 12.10 being the first version that actually came with my laptop's wifi firmware in the default installtion; when I first tried 12.04 I had to plug it into ethernet just to download it), and by that point, graphical stuff mostly worked without needing a ton of manual work, and it was past the era where I would have had to compile a custom kernel or something (although a few years later I did learn how to do that just for the fun of tinkering when I got a macbook with a wifi driver that wasn't released in a stable kernel for another few months), but when I started getting into gaming in the later part of the decade, I had to spend a decent bit of time learning about Wine, Crossover, Lutris, etc. Over the course of the next few years I started playing around with Proton in Steam, even for games that aren't released on Steam, and nowadays I don't even have Lutris or Crossover installed, and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game that Proton couldn't run.

At this point, Valve has done enough to make Linux gaming viable that they might have permanently bought my goodwill. Right now I mostly play on my Steam Deck an equal mix of games that are and aren't from Steam (streamed from my desktop with Moonlight, which itself is a third-party app rather than from Steam), but even if they started trying to lock things down more, I'm not sure I'd be able to get mad at them. So much of the investment they've made into the ecosystem has been in the tooling itself that isn't exclusive to them, ostensibly for the purpose of entering the "handheld desktop" gaming market (not sure what exactly to call it, but playing the same PC games on handhelds is demonstrably different from a handheld console with a separate catalog), but they did it in a way that benefited a lot more than just that. I don't pretend they're a perfect company, because those don't exist, but as far as companies go, this might be the first time I actually identify as a fan of one.

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning

Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.

Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net

Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).

If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!

I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn.

Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.

Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.

Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).

Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.

Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests.

Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.

The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React

[1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler

It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.

And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech

File search is also the fastest thing among all the 3 OS it's not even funny. Just use the Everything search app and a good file manager that can integrate Everything.

I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either.

Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).

The “Everything” application is what you want:

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.

I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.

Plus one for an Arch-based system, way better than Ubuntu/Debian for gaming. All these Nvidia driver issues totally disappeared when I switched.

Rolling release is a hell of a lot better in this context. SteamOS is Arch, IIRC.

If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters.

Also, there are 540Hz displays.

You want your minimum FPS to be your refresh rate. You won't notice when you're over it, but you likely will if you go below it.

In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.

Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.

To certain extent for online games it can be advantage (atleast it feels like it to me). AFAIK The server updates state between players at some (tick) rate when you have FPS above tick rate then the game interpolates between the states. The issue is that frames and networking might not be constantly synced so you are juggling between fps, screen refresh rate, ping and tick rate. In other words more frames you have higher the chance you will "get lucky" with latency of the game.

If you're not using V-sync, if a new frame is rendered while the previous one wasn't fully displayed yet, it gets swapped to the fresher one half-way through. This causes ugly screen tearing, but makes the game more responsive. You won't see the whole screen update at once, but like 1/5th of it will react instantly.

I used to do that until I switched to Wayland which forces vsync. It felt so unresponsive that I bought a 165hz display as a solution to that.

> Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

The reason is triple buffering:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...

I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:

"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."

I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.

Tying the input and simulation rates to the screen refresh rate is an old "best practice" that is still used in some games. In fact, a long time ago it was even an actual good practice.

I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.

osu (music beat-clicking game) has a built-in screen frequency a/b test, and despite running on a 60hz screen I can reliably pass that test up to 240hz. It's not just having 60 frames ready per second, it's what's in those frames.

if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang

They rewrote Explorer for Windows 11, in the process fucking it up completely.

There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.

You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really freaked out. No command line needed.

That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.

There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!

I used XFCE for years and liked it but it was so buggy and unmaintained. I recently switched to KDE and I am very satisfied with it.

> Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

Seems like you can just keep using the Battle.net account on GNU/Linux. You just add the Battle.net installer as a "non-steam game" (bottom left of the games list). Then, you start it, add your account, install the game and it "just works". I used it on the steam deck to play D4 beta and D2R on my CachyOS desktop.

> How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

My battle-hardened 1060GTX served me for years. I recently upgraded my whole rig from Debian + Intel + Nvidia to full AMD and the RX9070XT works very well, with the caveat that I had to switch to a newer kernel on CachyOS to support it. That was 4 months ago and the situation now should be resolved, so you can prob use any old normie distro.

You can also add external games to launch via steam too, so you might be able to do it without transferring.

If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.

On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

Barely works on windows too, though

Modern games are not just shooting stuff in competitive mode.

There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.

How did you find out that you had a rootkit?

[dead]

Games these days, just as before, are fantastic. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring(Nightreign), etc. And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p

For 90+ percent of Windows-only games I wanna play, the process for getting them to work on Linux is the following:

1. Hit the download button in Steam

2. Wait for it to download

3. Hit the play button

Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,

There are a lot of indie or other types of games that escape this. I mostly play games with local multiplayer, so I'm hanging out with people and playing at the same time. Recently got into Brotato, which has no 3d engine at all lol

I find this hard to believe. Generally speaking, games run slightly slower on Linux (that's on Arch with latest Nvidia drivers). Usually, the difference isn't really noticeable, and several rigorous benchmark show that even though average FPS is single digits lower, the standard deviation is also smaller. This may be due to Nvidia not performing as well on Linux, the worst impact I have seen is on Helldivers 2 (at least 15 to 20% lower FPS).

>JovianOS

Zero meaningful search results?

It works fine under Arch and its derivatives. Everything aside from kernel anticheat games runs fine.

I've never tried Mint, the two distros I've definitely experienced the vast majority of steam games just working out of the box were Fedora (earlier) and OpenSUSE (currently). I'm not lying. Although it's probably also worth mentioning I have a fairly modern AMD GPU (6800xt) - ymmv on NVidia or older cards.

ARC Raiders is currently all working perfectly for me. Such a blessing. I hope it stays this way.

I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

While you don't have to use it much, if you spend a year daily driving Linux, it's a near certainty that you'll have to use the command line.

As someone who had a 20yr break from MS software until a recent new job, I'm not sure it was Google who demolished Office.

I reckon it was MS. I can't believe how confusing/confounding/frustrating the modern MS Office and it's cloud integration is. I swear Office 2003 was miles better. And it seems that way with the UX of just about all their stuff now.

I would run into little functionality limitations/frustrations with the Google suite, but I wasn't prepared for how far ahead the UX is compared to MS tools.

If someone's needs are so basic that the crappy Google docs apps can meet them, then they could've been just as happy with LibreOffice. Google docs is not remotely competitive with MS office.

NixOS has been even better since it sees my whole system config and doesn’t need to derive the state from queries. I started with hello world and iterated into my perfect desktop env over a week.

> Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

What do you have in mind specifically? GNOME 3 is very mature, and has a consistent, polished design that far surpasses Windows 11. In fact, in view of recent macOS redesigns, I am tempted to say that it surpassed it too.

They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.

Linux had mature stable desktop stacks in the past, but they kinda sucked.

Churn (and consequent ongoing immaturity) seems to be the price we've paid in the last 10-15yrs of "progress" making them suck less. I hope it settles down a bit soon and we get to enjoy more longer term polish on these improvements though.

10 years ago Linus pointed out that most distros willingly break application compatibility all the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc

I'm not really following desktop Linux, is Linus' assessment still accurate?

I assume jjcm was talking about Valve shipping dedicated hardware, e.g. a Valve-branded gaming laptop which boots into SteamOS. That could help them achieve the same level of "Just Works" that Apple gets with macOS.

If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.

Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.

Valve, the monopolist, is releasing their secret ingredient (Proton) as open source, and actively maintaining it. I can't see how that could make Valve a monopoly on Windows-on-Linux gaming, actually the opposite.

I actually totally agree. This was because a friend who lives a thousand miles away also plays it (and his parents have different views on what Fortnite means). I'm sure gaming companies optimize for peer pressure effects, because that's so powerful.

...and yet they play ROBLOX, which is undoubtedly 100x worse.

Yeah. Consoles should be consoles. It should be considered unacceptable for a general purpose computer to run kernel level DRM.

What if you want to play with keyboard & mouse?

[dead]

The problem is anti-cheat, not DRM.

DRM can work on Linux, it's just developers choose to not enabled support, and in some cases (Epic Games) actively update games so it won't work with Linux.

Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.

Alternative options:

- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.

- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks

- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.

Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.

#1 Is MAU. I wouldn't find it out of the realm of possibility that only 25% of owners played in the prior month. I wonder what this is for other consoles. I personally contribute to bursts of playing then months of not even touching some of my consoles.

I have a Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up in months. It convinced me that I could game on Linux, now I game on my Desktop.

Isn't the more obvious answer that the market research firm got their number wrong?

Or, you know, most steam deck users aren't using them constantly and so they don't get picked up in the survey.

They likely stopped using them altogether.

An interesting example was Borderlands 2. The game originally had a native port by Aspyr, which worked quite well. 5 years pass and they release a new update and DLC - but they neglected to update the ports. 5 more years pass, then at some point in the past year or two they just plain removed the native Linux packages. They didn't announce it or anything so not 100% sure when. So these days when you install it you always get the (updated) Windows build under proton.

I'm a little sad we lost the native version, but on the other hand running it under proton just works, as I'd been doing for years, and the game would never have been updated otherwise.

Another example of this is Left 4 Dead 2, ironically made by Valve. The Windows client is far better, but unfortunately Valve hasn't fixed a bug that prevents joining VAC-secure servers when playing on Proton. This means you need to find an "insecure" server or host your own game.

Sometimes also a game will have a native linux binary but the Windows version with Proton works better (or at all) anyway...

I start non-Steam games with Wine and they run just as good.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...

It already was the default for SteamOS, but not for overall Linux until recently, I believe.

Consoles support kb and mouse. Most popular fps games support it.

Imho the future (or present) of normie friendly distros is in atomic linux. Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite, Aurora, SteamOS. It seems to me that Ubuntu on desktop is traditional but quite behind. For normies its gonna be some Fedora based distro and they choose Gnome or KDE.

That is exactly Linux Mint ( https://linuxmint.com/ ) . I encourage you to give it a try. It is what I have settled on after 25 years of using linux, and trying near about every distro in existence.

Is SolydK not good enough? There's also Mageia if you can stomach RPM instead of Deb (I prefer RPMs, but recognize it's a matter of personal taste).

Tried Mint?

Coming from PS1, I am still waiting on PlanetSide 3 :(